The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist-Hole: THE WITCH

Shrouded in portentous gloom and ominous droning electric cello, THE WITCH (2015) is the first great woodsy pre-Salem devil film in 300 years, a SHINING for the ANTICHRIST x BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW subdivision of the HAXAN community (with a dash of the recent HONEYMOON if you're keeping tabs). Set in 1630s New England on a small patch of farm and field surrounded by deep (if leafless) woods, it's a character piece that delves into the same dark patch of the soul that many witch and devil movies make feints at but then run away from, i.e. the actual dark superstitions and folk tales, court records, and the stories of gonzo early American mystics like Hawthorne, Poe and Ambrose Bierce. First time-writer/director Robert Eggers shows a real flair for the milieu and the genre both, making the narrative work, not unlike ROSEMARY'S BABY, as both a tale of paranoid female psyche in a patriarchy-rigged reproductive cycle con game, and a genuine menace of unknown malevolence lurking just outside the walls or within.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Thomasin (above, amidst deepdreamgenerator pareidolia), a naif new to the menstrual age who prays hard for deliverance from sinful thoughts but gets involved in all sorts of shady woodsy pagan subconscious strangeness anyway; Kate Dickie is her salt of the earth mom, ready to dissolve in the first hard rain (she stops sleeping or speaking coherently after her youngest infant is snatched by the evil witches); the nicely deep-voiced Ralph Ineson is superb as the ineffectual dad whose mule-headed pride gets them kicked out of the local Puritan community but who's afraid to speak up so his kids don't take the blame for his mistakes around the family dinner table. Harvey Scrimshaw is Caleb, the sacrificial Barleycorn offering of a young lad, still a boy but starting to lust for his developing sister. Running along around the house are moppet evil twins chanting and chasing a strapping horned goat named Black Peter, the embodiment of Goat of Mendes i.e. Baphomet, or maybe just in heat--either way he steals the show, and miraculously never seems CGI fake or badly cut-in to appear to not be doing naturally the eerie stuff he's up to without ever seeming entirely strange.

Above and beyond the naturalistic approach to horror and steady relentless camera movement, WITCH evokes THE SHINING in its deft maneuvering through the forest between sane rational perceptions and hallucination and madness. Rather than critique the time-period's intolerance, to either go the 'stern magistrate condemning the young hotties to the pyre' route, or the witch vowing revenge on her tormentor's descendants' route, Eggers offers something far more original in its ancient folklore straightforward narrative, one of dissolution in the face of supernatural meddling, magic too strong for a weak patriarch and his spiritually vulnerable family, especially in a time before electricity, pop culture, and the discrediting of alchemy.

If you've ever seen things move in the distance when you know they're not moving, but it's getting dark and you're far away, like a tree branch or an Aurora monster model on the shelf opposite your bed as the sun comes up, or like I used to see Jimi Hendrix gesturing with his guitar between his legs up against an undulating Marilyn Monroe when they were on adjoining closet doors in my dorm. Was it the dusk, the shrooms, childhood neuron imbalances? who knows, but each time I knew I was hallucinating. I knew if I went around screaming that the images were moving I might end up in a mental hospital, and that was truly terrifying to imagine. There's similar trains of movement here, the way family members blame each other for things missing or strange wounds on Danny's back, and that one must beware beautiful women visions materializing out of the darkness or the bathtub. These women are not young, but very very old, in the tradition of the sidpa bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead they come to you as undulating lovers, but devour your soul the closer towards lust you let it slide, 'til your stuck in amber, the frozen web of the fertilized embryo. And her demon aspect shred away the ego excess.




But all that said, the big question: is it really scary as folks say? I guess it might be if you're younger. At any rate I'm glad the Satanists like it. (1) They need a LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST to call their own, but as far as dredging up and biting down on the BLAIR WITCH primordial fear cortex, hmmm. Maybe if you came to it thinking it was just going to be another low budget horror movie at another festival, you'd be like damn, this is great. And sometimes a movie just has to be better at doing what it's doing than 95% of the other crap like it and it's a classic, because there's a lot of crap out there in this genre. And if it will make you want to dust off some of the old songs, Sam, after this, like THE DEVIL'S RAIN, maybe, BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN, maybe, RACE WITH THE DEVIL, then definitely, because North America is where the devil never left. The tribes, the entheogens, the art, the wendigos called into existence by long dead tribal shamen for revenge on some long dead person or people and never sent back, the Ouija-summoned demons still loafing around dusty basement air hockey tables and candle-wax covered card tables, never sent back or even knowingly sent for, but still there, urging heavy metal music onto the radios of passing teens. We here in the States know what it is to be frothing at the mouth and running loose naked in the woods after smoking a mere handful of jimson weed or mandrake root, or to be so hungry and afraid in the woods we see things we know aren't there, but there they are. That's why calling yourself a starving artist is almost a redundancy. As the brain gradually runs out of fuel it short circuits the electric current on the fence around the infernal pit. This is Man's natural condition, starving and insane on psychoactive molds and plants with roots in hell. Ask any ghost show on TV and they'll tell you, after this commercial break.

I well know that condition, and also the profound sense of deliverance prayer offers to the terrified woods-dweller. When I was around 14  I spent a summer at a Presbyterian summer camp in the woods of Maryland, and all it took was one mention of local devil creature 'the Goatman' crunching around in the leaves outside our 'hogan' and he became our obsession, the fear spreading from fire to fire until the whole camp was infected and the counsellors thought we were all crazy. I still remember the exact way our hogan mate said "I'm sleepin' with my bible tonight!" after he'd heard weird leaf crunching noises and a soft bleating outside the hogan early in the morning. We had to have our own bibles, mine a King James in banal paperback--became my teddy bear. Not that I ever cracked it open, ever read it unless forced. But we all started sleeping with our bibles from then on. By day we all laughed --me more than any--and in arts and crafts drew pictures of the Goatman, sculpted the Goatman, made up songs about the Goatman. But by night, we weren't laughing or even mentioning him in anything but a terse whisper; we prayed instead, and as we sang around the campfire the "One Tin Soldier,"Godspell repertoire, grateful transcendent tears would stream down our face. No atheists in a foxhole. Though I quickly learned I could get the same assurance by reading my digest-size SGT. ROCK annual, where there were foxholes aplenty and not a mention of God to be found. We didn't need God though, when we had tanks and machine guns and a flag.